Fall 2003: Modern Drama: Selected Plays from 1879 to the Present Walter Levy, Pace University ISBN: 0-13-226721-7 Prentice Hall Paper; 985 pp Published: 10/21/1998
Before this and next Chekhov chapter, read pomo and 413notes. The postmodernist theories in good books are cosidered as a new methodology of analysis, but you read my nonfiction (Self, POV, Tech), you know that I take POMO philosophies much more serious -- we live in those postmodern conditions. If not even in post-pomo conditions. Why it's so important? I use theory for practical needs (directing) and therefore PM analysis of Chekhov has to be projected within the production like 3 Sisters. I have to bridge my (our) world with his, the present with the past, I have to get over historicuty without losing historical.
Read Theatre Theory files in Part III. Script & Spectator
Theatre Theory JT Michigan quarterly review DA Fall 2000 v 39 n 4 PG 796 AU Rich, Elisabeth T. Chekhov and the Moscow Stage Today: Interviews with Leading Russian Theater Directors.
Method Acting for Directors: showcase -- 3 Sisters
Besides the show, please check the Method Acting pages; many aspects of the Chekhov's drama could be seen differently in the light of the psychological realism, according to Stanislavsky. The practical issue -- Method Acting needs another wave of rethinking from the Century 21 Bridge (The Third Wave?)
Chekhov: Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their ploughing of the soil. The muscles of the horse are as taut as fiddle-strings, and suddenly a horse-fly alights on its croup, buzzing and stinging. The horse's skin quivers, it waves its tail. What is the fly buzzing about? It probably doesn't know itself. It simply has a restless nature and wants to make itself felt — "I'm alive, too, you know!" it seems to say. "Look, I know how to buzz, there's nothing I can't buzz about!" I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch. — Quoted by Maxim Gorky in "Anton Chekhov," On Literature
The Three Sisters is a play, written in 1900 and first produced in 1901, by Russian author Anton Chekhov. Four young people - Olga, Masha, Irina and Andrei Prozorov - are left stranded in a provincial backwater after the death of their father, an army general. They focus their dreams on returning to Moscow, a city remembered through the eyes of childhood as a place where happiness is possible.
TRIVIA * Vivien Leigh ended her career in triumph in the 1966 in New York staging in Anton Chekhov's play Ivanov.
Vanessa Redgrave appeared as Nina in Sidney Lumet's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Sea Gull (1968).
German theater director Peter Stein, the artistic director of the politically radical Berlin Schaubühne, included in his final productions for the Schaubühne Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters (1984).
French film director Louis Malle's last film, Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), follows a rehearsal in New York City of Uncle Vanya, a play by Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. Starring the same two principle actors of My Dinner with André, Vanya on 42nd Street blurs the distinction between life and theatrical performance.
British stage and motion picture actor Sir Anthony Hopkins directed, scored, and starred in 1996 the film August, an adaptation of the play Uncle Vanya.
When you fashion a story you necessarily concern yourself with its limits: out of slew of main and secondary characters you choose only one — the wife or the husband — place him against the background and describe him alone and therefore also emphasize him, while you scatter the others in the background like small change, and you get something like the night sky: a single large moon and a slew of very small stars. But the moon doesn't turn out right because you can see it only when the other stars are visible too, but the stars aren't set off. So I turn out a sort of patchwork quilt rather than literature. What can I do? I simply don't know. I will simply depend on all-healing time. — To Alexei Suvorin, October 27, 1888
The Chekhov Theatre; A Century of the Plays in Performance -- Laurence Senelick £19.95 * April 2000 | Paperback (Hardback) | 458 pages 51 half-tones | ISBN: 052178395X
There are several Chekhov's one-act comedies I use for class projects in my acting-directing projects (finals): Wedding, On the High Road, Proposal, Bear. [public domain]
Vishnevyi sad [The Cherry Orchard] (1904) (THR215 DramLit):
Chekhov's last play was written in the final year of his life when he was desperately ill with the tuberculosis that had overshadowed so much of his life. Yet, despite his own tragic circumstances, he remained defiantly insistent that his play was exactly as specified in the subtitle - 'A Comedy in Four Acts'. From his letters and notebooks, he appears to have been retracing his own comic roots, glancing back to the example of one of his favourite comic writers, Nikolai Gogol, whose “laughter through tears” formula would have commended itself to Chekhov: “I dream of writing a very funny play where the devil would go about in a whirlwind of chaos.” It seems an unusually puckish and mischievous project for a dying writer, but those who first read and performed it for the Moscow Arts Theatre were overwhelmed by tears not laughter. Chekhov was mightily displeased that his comedy had been turned into a tearful tragedy and remonstrated with the director, Nemirovich-Danchenko, and his partner, the great actor, Stanislavsky, claiming that they had failed to read the play attentively enough.
On the face of it, the subject of the play would appear to be one that Russians at the turn of the new century found it impossible not to regard with great seriousness – social change – the passing away of an old, aristocratic, social order and people's hopes for a new social order. Throughout the nineteenth century, Russia had failed to adapt to the political and social challenges of the modern world. In the new century there was a desperate need for change and yet a weary sense of political impotence and social bankruptcy. In such a context, it is hardly surprising that the subject of Chekhov's play would have struck most Russians as a profoundly serious one. But the subject of a play does not, in itself, define an author's attitude towards that subject. The play conjures up for its audience a whole range of attitudes to the past, the present, and the future, but the comedy ensures that the audience is made aware of the inadequacies of all the characters in their attempts to cope with the passing of time. The different ways in which different characters perceive the cherry orchard make it a focal symbol for a highly poetic exploration of the theme of time and social change.
The action of the play depends upon a simple arrival-departure structure. In Act 1, the return of Madame Ranevskaya, her daughter Anya, and her entourage, to the estate, occurs just at the moment when the estate is about to be sold to pay off their debts: the family is all but bankrupt. Lopakhin, whose family were formerly serfs on the estate, is now a rich merchant and he puts forward a good plan to rescue the family from total loss of their estate: sell the orchard for summer cottage building plots. Ranevskaya and her brother cannot contemplate the destruction of the orchard: the plan is rejected. In Act II, Lopakhin continues without success to persuade them to sell. In Act III, Madame Ranevskaya hosts a bizarre, seedy ball on the same day that the estate is being auctioned. Her intimations of impending disaster are confirmed when a drunken Lopakhin returns to announce that he, the son of a serf, is now the owner of the cherry orchard and the estate. He intends to carry out his plan to chop down the orchard and build summer cottages. In Act IV, everything has been packed up, the family is ready to depart. It seems that the ancient servant, Firs, is the only character who will not survive the traumatic change that has taken place. Locked in, left behind, and neglected, Firs lies down – to pass away. Offstage can be heard the axes, chopping down the cherry trees. The passing away of the orchard has been used throughout the play to give lyrical expression to the central theme of time and change. From the beauty of its May-time blossom, outside the windows of the nursery in the first act, to its skyline presence as an insignificant part of a much vaster world of time and nature in the second act, and, finally, its loss and destruction in the last two acts – the orchard has been a strangely mute, yet natural, chorus to the relentless force of change.
Part of the subtlety of the play is that it invites the audience's imagination to engage with different orders of temporal experience and the sheer strangeness of our existence in time. The play is a comedy not simply because of the large number of comic scenes and characters but because of the author's attitude to his subject – and that attitude is chiefly defined by Chekhov's emphasis upon survival and the acceptance of change. The play registers the pathos of Fir's passing, the orchard's destruction, the dull suffering of change in so many different lives - but life is going on. The Ranevskayas have survived this traumatic change in their fortunes. The last act makes clear that, even if they are not fully in control of what is happening to them, they are letting go of their past, they are moving on. The comic detachment of Chekhov's treatment allows the audience to recognise, for example, the fecklessness and infantilism of the Ranevskayas, or, the immature idealism of Trofimov's revolutionary rhetoric – but, at no point, does the diagnosis allow the audience to simplify that subtle juxtaposing of conflicting attitudes and feelings. The audience are forced to be both critical and compassionate with all of the characters: 'truth', in Chekhovian comedy, is a relative construct.
Summarising the plot of The Cherry Orchard is a somewhat futile task because it tells us so little about what it means to experience the play. Compared with a conventional naturalist drama, the play can seem curiously plotless and its characters may seem to be marooned in a world of inaction. Instead of heroes and villains dominating a well-plotted action, there would seem to be as many plots as there are characters. Our attention is dispersed across a series of tiny scenic units which offer fragmentary and episodic glimpses into characters differing in age, sex, rank, and values: the character range is sufficient to create the illusion that the social world of the estate mirrors that larger social microcosm of which it is but a tiny part. When Trofimov, the young student radical, claims that “all Russia is our orchard”, the audience is prompted to make an implicit recognition of the representative value and scope of that estate world. But it is patterns of attitude and feeling that become the focus of audience attention and Chekhov's orchestration of these patterns across the generations, between masters and servants, between men and women, makes the whole web of relationships on stage utterly absorbing. Instead of sensational incidents, heroic confrontations, or melodramatic conflicts, Chekhov creates a dramatic texture that depends upon a mosaic of tiny incidents, the minutiae of everyday encounters. The slender narrative thread that ties the characters and incidents together is the loss of the estate but that 'action' is not the locus of audience interest, it is the changing perceptions and feelings of the characters in relation to their situation that captures our attention.
Throughout his career, Chekhov had waged war on the insidious influence of political and social stereotypes in his country's dialogue with itself. While he may have accepted the inevitability of revolution in Russia, there are many elements in the play which suggest a deliberate challenge to the stereotypical thinking of the ideologues of left and right. The fierce political arguments of the time may have predisposed an audience to think in terms of the stock types commonly mobilised in such debates – the ineffectual, feckless landowner, the revolutionary student, the kulak or rich merchant from peasant origins – but while the playwright deploys these familiar social (and stage) types, his play works to subvert the stereotypes. In his letters, his advice to the actors playing different roles is invariably calculated to make them discard any stereotypical assumptions. For example, by insisting that the aristocratic Stanislavsky should act the part of the merchant, Lopakhin, Chekhov clearly felt that such casting would work against the class stereotype. Most tellingly, he confided to his wife, the actress Olga Knipper, that Lopakhin needed to be understood as the central character in the play. Instead of a rapacious, money-grubbing kulak, Chekhov insisted that Lopakhin had to be understood as a sensitive, decent, hard-working person. It is significant that in the final act, Trofimov, the young revolutionary, seems to have completely revised his crude stereotype of the merchant when he praises Lopakhin's fine, sensitive soul and his slender fingers that are like an artist's. But to focus on a single role, or character, does scant justice to the complex poetic achievement of Chekhov's drama which allows him to interweave different genres and styles of characterisation.
While as a whole the play seems to achieve an unusually complex interweaving of the naturalistic, the comic, the tragic, and the poetic, there are two major groupings of the characters that operate on quite different generic wavelengths. The central group is made up of characters that engage the audience's sympathies in a predominantly, naturalistic fashion: Lyubov, Lopakhin, Trofimov, Anya, Varya, and Gayev. The depth and complexity of the latter characters is grounded in naturalist conventions. The remaining characters are not devoid of naturalist touches, nor pathos, but their primary function seems to be to offer comic perspectives upon the principal characters. Yepikhodov, Pishchik, Dunyasha, Yasha, Charlotta, and Firs, are figures that help to release some of the most powerful comic energies in the play while retaining both choric and thematic functions. Yepikhodov, for example, may be one of the most grotesquely farcical characters in the play but he is crucial to that musical patterning of attitude and feeling by means of which Chekhov shapes a richly ambivalent, audience response - often poised on a knife-edge between tears and laughter. His nickname, “two-and-twenty-misfortunes ”, defines his essentially farcical nature since his daily life is a never-ending catalogue of humiliating blunders and domestic pratfalls. But the image of this forlorn clown whose existence is measured out in “misfortunes” appears to replay in a parodic, minor key that theme of change, and tragic “misfortune”, which dominates the main action. Even his lovelorn, romantic fatalism farcically exaggerates, and indirectly comments upon, feelings and attitudes that we encounter in a major, naturalistic key with Lyubov Andreyevna, Anya, and Trofimov.
But none of these secondary, comic characters works in isolation. Critics appeal to Chekhov's “musicalisation” of the dramatic texture because they recognise the intensely “musical” imagination that he brings to the interplay of voices, groupings, motifs, and generic key shifts. In terms of “misfortune”, for example, Yepikhodov may offer a drolly, parodic counterpoint to Ranevskaya but Pishchik, who is equally as feckless as Lyubov, does not suffer change – he welcomes it. The musical variation is complete when as audience we find ourselves rejoicing in the accident of his good fortune in the final act and, then, just as quickly, find ourselves puzzled by how keenly we are touched by Pishchik's distraught incomprehension at the news of the family's impending departure. The stark image of almost mute, childlike hurt in the face of unexpected loss and separation catches most audiences off-guard, as clowns so often do, but it also prepares the audience to see, moments later, Lyubov and Gayev huddling together in the nursery for the last time, equally childlike and vulnerable. However, the latter moment is preceded and counterpointed by a moment of (almost) vaudeville farce when Lopakhin fails to propose to Varya.
The Cherry Orchard refuses its audience the comfort of a fixed point or perspective from which to view the action. Change is both the thematic and stylistic heart of the play. If plays, like musical pieces, had pointers to tempo and expression then The Cherry Orchard would have to be marked “Mutevole” (changeable), although “Tumulto” (confused state) might be closer to Chekhov's initial yearning for a comedy that would be like a whirlwind. Part of the whirlwind is the ceaseless flux of change where, in spite of Lopakhin's vision of human beings as giants, the dream of controlling our own destinies must remain a dream insofar as our lives will remain subject to chance – fortune and misfortune. But part of the whirlwind belongs to comedy's irreverent dismantling of the clichés and stereotypes of the social world. Lyubov, Lopakhin, and Trofimov, are central to Chekhov's deconstruction of the stereotypes which as social types carried considerable ideological weight in the political conflicts at the turn of the century in Russia. Unfortunately, Chekhov's success in transforming Lyubov Andreyevna into a living character rather than a type tends to tip the balance of modern productions towards that tragedy of dispossession which he clearly wanted to subvert in favour of comic detachment. Many of the most negative traits that would seem to confirm the class stereotype are present – her inability to see people who are of a lower class, her fetishism of objects and neglect of people, her fecklessness and class guilt, and her self-centredness. But Chekhov works to complicate the type so that snobbery keeps company with unaffectedness, toughness with sentimental effusiveness, passion with aristocratic sangfroid, and so on. Her vivacity, impulsiveness, and scattiness, make her into an irrepressible force of living changefulness – Lopakhin's unspoken, barely conscious, love for her is the most eloquent testimony to her finest qualities. A living character, not a stereotype.
By the end of the play, most audiences would find it hard to resist Trofimov's diagnosis at the end of Act II that the institution of serfdom, the owning of living souls, “has caused degeneration in us all”. Masters and servants alike have been corrupted by serf-owning and some of the most satirical moments in the play expose the extent of that corruption. But the audience is not forced to take sides, the judgement is less important than the recognition of the evenhandedness and objectivity of the diagnosis. Chekhov once suggested that had he had a hand in the training of young doctors then he would have insisted that before proceeding to diagnosis they should first make their patients laugh. The diagnosis in The Cherry Orchard is a social one and it includes the audience within the diagnosis. [ www.LitEncyc.com ]
He qualified as a doctor in 1884 although he rarely practised. In his hundreds of stories and novellas, which he wrote while practicing medicine, Chekhov adopts something of a clinical approach to ordinary life.
After a successful production of The Seagull by the Moscow Art Theatre, he wrote three more plays for the same company: Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. In 1901 he married Olga Leonardovna Knipper (1870-1959), an actress who performed in his plays.
The movement toward Naturalism in theatre that was sweeping Europe reached its highest artistic peak in Russia in 1898 with the formation of the Moscow Art Theatre (later called the Moscow Academy Art Theatre). Its name became synonymous with that of Chekhov, whose plays about the day-to-day life of the landed gentry achieved a delicate poetic realism that was years ahead of its time. Konstantin Stanislavsky, its director, became the 20th century's most influential theorist on acting.
Chekhov died of tuberculosis and is now buried in Novodevichy Cemetery.
"Chekhov's plays and short stories are considered seminal steps on the path to modern literature, mostly because they dote on the ordinary details and the vernacular landscape of the human soul. In addition, the writer - who trained as a physician - respected precision, and he created a compact, compressed form of storytelling that prefigures the absurdism of Samuel Beckett and the minimalism of Raymond Carver." Jacob Stockinger, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey
By Janet Malcolm, Random House 212 pages, $23.95
Chekhov after Beckett. Shestov's book "From the Void": Existentialism and Absurd. Chekhov destroys the fundation of the "Russian Soul" -- not just hope but the capacity "to hope" (anti-Russian writer, according to Shestov). Chekhov's talant is the Russian curse: he is about to end Russian literature.
Major Schools of Thought in the 20th century. Mostmodern thinkers -- Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Virilio, Buadrillard -- and Chekhov.
Old schools -- Hegel, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche.
During the Perestroyka the Moscow Art Theatre got slip in two -- Gorky MAT (new building) and Chekhov MAT (old building, the original).
From 3 Sisters Forum: Contemtorary connotations (director's
diaries).
Vershinin-Clinton, a good guy, who has no idea what he is talking about. "The road to hell is built on good wishes" (Dante). Vershinin is a epythomy of all of them -- the dreamers.
Are we responsible for our dreams? We do not know how to dream!
We are terrorized by the past (Freud) and we try to escape into the future:
we skip the present.
Russian language doesn't have many grammatical terms as English
(time-oriented language). there are only three basic tenses -- the Russian Mind is space-oriented; this is why each word is locked into sentense -- prefix and ending allow you to move any word (you can see it in my English).
Now, how do Russians can deal with the future, when they have no apparatus to comprehand it?
Americans have no respect for space -- highways are the space denounciation. If they can't escape the space limitations horizontally, they build their roads upward -- skyscapers, vertical villages, alone the main street evelators.
Europe has no numerical names for its avenues -- only in America!
What about the Three Sisters?
The end of the play is the end of SPACE -- no place for them -- they entered The American Age of Time. They don't know how to live in space which is time. Only we know how to build home-pages in cyber-space, which is time, not real "space." The 3 Sisters discussion list doesn't exist in space. Like our dreams, hopes,
wishes. "American Dream" is in time-space, not space-space. (There is a chapter on time-production in my Post-America book).
I promised to post my directior's diaries and I have no time to do it...
Remember the two curtain calls -- Bergson wrote a good book on time and
memory; he linked the two -- time asks for memory.
"Remember-me" is Alaskan State flower. This is the end of the play.
"Remember-me"... FORGET-ME-NOT...
[from the director's notebook]
Cherry Orchard (elements of Chekhov's exposition)
ACT ONE
A room which is still called the nursery. One of the doors leads into ANYA'S room. It is close on sunrise. It is May. The cherry-trees are in flower but it is chilly in the garden. There is an early frost. The windows of the room are shut. DUNYASHA comes in with a candle, and LOPAKHIN with a book in his hand.
LOPAKHIN. The train's arrived, thank God. What's the time?
DUNYASHA. It will soon be two. [Blows out candle] It is light already.
LOPAKHIN. How much was the train late? Two hours at least. [Yawns and stretches himself] I have made a rotten mess of it! I came here on purpose to meet them at the station, and then overslept myself . . . in my chair. It's a pity. I wish you'd wakened me.
DUNYASHA. I thought you'd gone away. [Listening] I think I hear them coming.
LOPAKHIN. [Listens] No. . . . They've got to collect their luggage and so on. . . . [Pause] Lubov Andreyevna has been living abroad for five years; I don't know what she'll be like now. . . . She's a good sort--an easy, simple person. I remember when I was a boy of fifteen, my father, who is dead--he used to keep a shop in the village here--hit me on the face with his fist, and my nose bled. . . . We had gone into the yard together for something or other, and he was a little drunk. Lubov Andreyevna, as I remember her now, was still young, and very thin, and she took me to the washstand here in this very room, the nursery. She said, "Don't cry, little man, it'll be all right in time for your wedding." [Pause] "Little man". . . . My father was a peasant, it's true, but here I am in a white waistcoat and yellow shoes . . . a pearl out of an oyster. I'm rich now, with lots of money, but just think about it and examine me, and you'll find I'm still a peasant down to the marrow of my bones. [Turns over the pages of his book] Here I've been reading this book, but I understood nothing. I read and fell asleep. [Pause.]
DUNYASHA. The dogs didn't sleep all night; they know that they're coming.
LOPAKHIN. What's up with you, Dunyasha . . . ?
DUNYASHA. My hands are shaking. I shall faint.
LOPAKHIN. You're too sensitive, Dunyasha. You dress just like a lady, and you do your hair like one too. You oughtn't. You should know your place.
EPIKHODOV. [Enters with a bouquet. He wears a short jacket and brilliantly polished boots which squeak audibly. He drops the bouquet as he enters, then picks it up] The gardener sent these; says they're to go into the dining-room. [Gives the bouquet to DUNYASHA.]
LOPAKHIN. And you'll bring me some kvass.
DUNYASHA. Very well. [Exit.]
EPIKHODOV. There's a frost this morning--three degrees, and the cherry-trees are all in flower. I can't approve of our climate. [Sighs] I can't. Our climate is indisposed to favour us even this once. And, Ermolai Alexeyevitch, allow me to say to you, in addition, that I bought myself some boots two days ago, and I beg to assure you that they squeak in a perfectly unbearable manner. What shall I put on them?
LOPAKHIN. Go away. You bore me.
EPIKHODOV. Some misfortune happens to me every day. But I don't complain; I'm used to it, and I can smile. [DUNYASHA comes in and brings LOPAKHIN some kvass] I shall go. [Knocks over a chair] There. . . . [Triumphantly] There, you see, if I may use the word, what circumstances I am in, so to speak. It is even simply marvellous. [Exit.]
DUNYASHA. I may confess to you, Ermolai Alexeyevitch, that Epikhodov has proposed to me.
LOPAKHIN. Ah!
DUNYASHA. I don't know what to do about it. He's a nice young man, but every now and again, when he begins talking, you can't understand a word he's saying. I think I like him. He's madly in love with me. He's an unlucky man; every day something happens. We tease him about it. They call him "Two-and-twenty troubles."
LOPAKHIN. [Listens] There they come, I think.
DUNYASHA. They're coming! What's the matter with me? I'm cold all over.
LOPAKHIN. There they are, right enough. Let's go and meet them. Will she know me? We haven't seen each other for five years.
DUNYASHA. [Excited] I shall faint in a minute. . . . Oh, I'm fainting!
Two carriages are heard driving up to the house. LOPAKHIN and DUNYASHA quickly go out. The stage is empty. A noise begins in the next room. FIERS, leaning on a stick, walks quickly across the stage; he has just been to meet LUBOV ANDREYEVNA. He wears an old-fashioned livery and a tall hat. He is saying something to himself, but not a word of it can be made out. The noise behind the stage gets louder and louder. A voice is heard: "Let's go in there." Enter LUBOV ANDREYEVNA, ANYA, and CHARLOTTA IVANOVNA with a little dog on a chain, and all dressed in travelling clothes, VARYA in a long coat and with a kerchief on her head. GAEV, SIMEONOV-PISCHIN, LOPAKHIN, DUNYASHA with a parcel and an umbrella, and a servant with luggage --all cross the room.
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PS
ChekhovNow is a sort of the "Chekhov5"... "Current Chekhov" or should I dare to say -- Chekhov of Tomorrow?
General analysis of Time and Space analysis in Themes!
Action? Could an emotion be the subject of ACTION? (Poetry?) Thought as Action (story). Compare with the Character as Story (Character-oriented plays; other examples).
[ Where are the notes on "Seagull"? ]
Homework
Select one monologue for in-class-analysis. Sample:
IVANOV: I used to have a workman called Simon, you remember him. Once, at threshing time, to show the girls how strong he was, he loaded himself with two sacks of rye, and broke his back. He died soon after. I think I have broken my back also. First I went to school, then to the university, then came the cares of this estate, all my plans--I did not believe what others did; did not marry as others did; I worked passionately, risked everything; no one else, as you know, threw their money away to right and left as I did. So I heaped the burdens on my back, and it broke. We are all heroes at twenty, ready to attack anything, to do everything, and at thirty are worn-out, useless men. Only a man equally miserable and suffering, as Paul is, could love or esteem me now. Good God! How I loathe myself! How bitterly I hate my voice, my hands, my thoughts, these clothes, each step I take! How ridiculous it is, how disgusting! Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, full of pride and energy and enthusiasm. I worked with these hands here, and my words could move the dullest man to tears. I could weep with sorrow, and grow indignant at the sight of wrong. I could feel the glow of inspiration, and understand the beauty and romance of the silent nights which I used to watch through from evening until dawn, sitting at my work-table, and giving my soul up to dreams. I believed in a bright future then, and looked into it as trustfully as a child looks into its mothers eyes. And now ... oh, I am tired and without hope; I spend my days and nights in idleness; I have no control over my feet and brain. My estate is ruined, my woods are falling under the blows of the axe. And what can I think of my treatment of Sarah? I promised her love and happiness forever; I opened her eyes to the promise of a future such as she had never dreamed of. She believed me, and though for five years I have seen her sinking under the weight of her sacrifices to me, and losing her strength in her struggles with her conscience, God knows she has never given me one angry look, or uttered one word of reproach. What is the result? That I don't love her! She is suffering; her days are numbered; yet I fly like a contemptible coward from her white face, her sunken chest, her pleading eyes. What is the matter with me? I can't understand it. The easiest way out would be a bullet through the head!
[ IVANOV, A monologue from the play by Anton Chekhov. This translation by Marian Fell was first published in 1912 by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. It is now a public domain work and may be performed without royalties. ]
[As usual 200 words must be posted after the reading of Chekhov's play.]
[ Translated by Julius West, 1916
From: Plays, by Anton Tchekoff. 2d series, tr. with an introduction by Julius West. New York, Scribner's, 1917. 277 p. 20 cm. CONTENTS: On the high road.--The proposal.-The wedding.--The bear.--A tragedian in spite of himself.--The anniversary.--The three sisters.--The cherry orchard. ]
ASTROFF. Have I changed much since then?
MARINA. Oh, yes. You were handsome and young then, and now you
are an old man and not handsome any more. You drink, too.
ASTROFF. Yes, ten years have made me another man. And why?
Because I am overworked. Nurse, I am on my feet from dawn till
dusk. I know no rest; at night I tremble under my blankets for
fear of being dragged out to visit some one who is sick; I have
toiled without repose or a day's freedom since I have known you;
could I help growing old? And then, existence is tedious, anyway;
it is a senseless, dirty business, this life, and goes heavily.
Every one about here is silly, and after living with them for two
or three years one grows silly oneself. It is inevitable.
[Twisting his moustache] See what a long moustache I have grown.
A foolish, long moustache. Yes, I am as silly as the rest, nurse,
but not as stupid; no, I have not grown stupid. Thank God, my
brain is not addled yet, though my feelings have grown numb. I
ask nothing, I need nothing, I love no one, unless it is yourself
alone. [He kisses her head] I had a nurse just like you when I
was a child.
MARINA. Don't you want a bite of something to eat?
ASTROFF. No. During the third week of Lent I went to the epidemic
at Malitskoi. It was eruptive typhoid. The peasants were all
lying side by side in their huts, and the calves and pigs were
running about the floor among the sick. Such dirt there was, and
smoke! Unspeakable! I slaved among those people all day, not a
crumb passed my lips, but when I got home there was still no rest
for me; a switchman was carried in from the railroad; I laid him
on the operating table and he went and died in my arms under
chloroform, and then my feelings that should have been deadened
awoke again, my conscience tortured me as if I had killed the
man. I sat down and closed my eyes--like this--and thought: will
our descendants two hundred years from now, for whom we are
breaking the road, remember to give us a kind word? No, nurse,
they will forget.
TRIVIA * Vivien Leigh ended her career in triumph in the 1966 in New York staging in Anton Chekhov's play Ivanov.
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